Our recent “Come Together: Black America Sings Lennon & McCartney” release was so well received that a second volume became a certainty. Here on “Let It Be” we extend the remit by bringing in the Beatles’ third great songwriter, George Harrison. Given that their prolific songwriting sprang from a shared appreciation of black American music of the 1950s and early 60s, it should surprise nobody that Lennon, McCartney and Harrison would come up with songs that would inspire black Americans to add them to their discographies.

It was a glossy, brash new form of pop music born out of ashes of late 1970s disco and funk and, just as in America, was the soundtrack to a new generation for whom money, style and flirtation trumped the overblown psychedelia of the previous decade. Eager to sound as American as possible with no hint of the fervor for afro-beat, afro-rock and afrocentric thinking that the 1970s had thrown up, a new generation of young artists and performers turned their backs on their cultural roots in music and sought a new kind of stardom and fame firmly connected to the glossy, snazzy world of the 1980s that was erupting in the USA and Europe.